Simple calendar — I even considered adding google calendar events using gcalcli, but the desktop was way too crowded

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and system stats

Almost everything you see is drawn on desktop using conky. There are however, few major drawbacks:

With conky you get either full transparency, or no transparency at all. It's all or nothing

Conky cannot draw pictures.

So how did I get the transparent sidebars and icons? Gotcha! They are part of the desktop background.

I also decided to omit the analog clock — this is certainly doable with gdesklets or screenlets, but I almost fainted when I saw the dependencies. My desktop stays lightweight, no matter what. I tried the lightweight adesklets but the result was disappointing.

To recreate this desktop you need:

"Patched" background — I provide a GIMP layered image, you just need to replace the background layer for the image of your choice

I am using tint2 as the panel, but any transparent panel (such as gnome-panel) should do

Installing the RTM command line tool might be tricky, as the author notes, you need to install RTMAgent perl module first:

This package is split in two components:

RTMAgent.pm: a Perl module that implements the low-level API. It provides a UserAgent object which lets you call all of RTM's API methods as normal Perl methods. You will need to install it from CPAN: cpan install WebService::RTMAgent

rtm: a Perl script that uses RTMAgent to implement a command line interface. Just put it in your path.

It seems that there are two flavors of the cpan installation scripts, mine required the following syntax: cpan -fi WebService::RTMAgent, where -fi stands for force install, as one of the dependencies failed its unit tests. Your cpan scripts syntax might vary, check the corresponding manual first.

After installing the RTMAgent, run rtm --authorise, follow the generated link and allow RTM API access. This should be done only once, before the first run.

That should be all. Both wallpaper and conky configs are designed for 1280x800 resolution, you'll probably have to move things a bit for different resolutions. Unpack the attached archive to ~ (archive contains hidden files, you have been warned), set the background, set up rtm, gmail and weather forecast and run ~/scripts/start_conky.

If you want a lightweight clock for a really lightweight desktop, I recommend xonclock, it's dependencies are none beyond xlibs and libpng and libjpeg, and consumes around 2Mb of memory, and differently form cairo-clock it doesn't need a composite manager.

dtbsz, sadly, your comment couldn't be more wrong. But if you insist that windows rules and linux is just a copycat OS based off the much older Unix, so be it. Its great that one would embrace ignorance, the less people who use linux, the less exploitation to viruses and malware we shall receive.

Tomáš, Thank you for your work, I think it looks great! I'm only having a slight problem with CPAN/RTM right now, it appears to be broken, I have only seen one other person with the same problem over @ Ubuntu's forums, but no solutions as of yet.

CPAN fails with the webservice::RTMAgent command, I tried several alternatives/Variations, I can't get RTMAgent to work I'll have to compile it from source, if I get it, and I'll let you know.

I'm using UbuntuStudio, btw. I have noticed variations in some code being broken between different versions of ubuntu as well debian, so this could be an isolted incident with my particular version CPAN.

@Aspanu: I am not sure if compiling it from source is a good idea. Installing it from cpan triggered a full tree of dependencies, which the script resolved automatically. Doing this manually would be a tedious task.

Did you try the "official method"?

cpan install WebService::RTMAgent

It didn't work for me, but at least the script suggested a correct syntax.

I have just installed it and everything works well. It looks very good. I am having one small issue, though. If I click on anything on the desktop, all of the information conky provides disappears. A ps aux indicates that it is still running in the background, however, they are no longer visible. I was wondering if anyone else was having the same issue, and what was done to fix it. I am running Debian unstable on a Dell Laptop (d810), radeon x600 with proprietary driver. Thanks again, J.

@Anonymous: Did you modify conky configuration files? This seems like conky's own_window_type is not set to desktop. If you did not touch the configuration however, it seems like a bug. In that case, I recommend asking on conky mailing list or irc channel.

@kumorigoe: Assuming you have copied all the files from the archive (even the hidden directories .conky and .font), open terminal and type

~/scripts/start_conky

If you want to run this script at each startup, you need some extra work. This is DE dependent, if you are running gnome, try gnome session manager (somewhere in the menus). I am running openbox, so I'm not of much help here.

Thanks for the quick reply...I figured it out. I had not modified the config files, but I saw your mention of special setting for nautilus. I killed nautilus and restarted conky, and all is good now. Thanks again...J.

in your conky configuration file. If you do, you might have the same problem as the anonymous commenter above you. I think it might have something to do with the fact, that nautilus is drawing icons on desktop. I am not sure how he resolved this issue.

You might want to turn this behavior off in gconf (if you can live with no icons).

I think i have gotten the weather config correct with my license and key, and I can get the system window to display. However, I'm still getting brown bars at the top and bottom of my screen, and the weather information is bigger than the desktop, outside the right area where it should be.

I'm having trouble getting weather and system stats displaying. I had to fiddle with rtm (basically just a matter of install YAML through synaptic and then installing the RTM dependencies) as well as the email (I wanted to check gApps email, so I discovered it is the same URL, you just use the full email as the username -- I also discovered that wget did not like the https://username:password ... if the first of the password is numbers, so I took that out and added the wget switches "--http-user=$user --http-password=$pass") but they both work like a charm now.

Still no clue on the weather and system stats, though. I see absolutely nothing... and I'm certain that I made all of the necessary changes for weather.

and see what happens; if there is a problem, conky will probably tell you in its output.

For the weather: open the config, find the command, which is executing the weather script, copy it and run it in the terminal. That should give you some clue. Also, you need to register at weather.com, as the linked weather config tutorial suggests.

Thanks for the reply. I realize I can just create it, but you mentioned something about running the configs separately. Where are they? I am having some of the same issues others have had where it opens a bunch of system monitor windows. When closing any of them I get "XIO: fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server ":0.0" after 2725 requests (2721 known processed) with 0 events remaining."After digging into it I discovered that I didn't have the .conky directory so I figured that it was created somewhere in one of the supplied scripts which also put the configuration files in there, but I don't have any of this. I'd like to get conky worky but it seems I am missing something?

@JPHlem: There is a ".conky" directory in the zip archive, where you can find all conky settings. It is a hidden file so you may not be able to see it. Try pressing CTRL + H in you file browser (that should generally show you hidden files, but it might not work in your file browser), or the safest way is to do

ls -la ~/.conky

Or maybe your archiver application didn't extract the file, because it was hidden. Try opening the archive again and make sure .conky is extracted.